Crock Pot Chicken Stew!

This is becoming one of my new favorite meals. Partly, that's because I like how it tastes, but I wouldn't say I love it, exactly. Given the choice, I would totally prefer pizza or alfredo primavera or chicken parmigiana. In a heartbeat. But the chicken stew is pretty good, it's fairly easy to make and, best of all, it's ridiculously low in calories!

It's pretty simple - some chicken thighs, 3 potatoes, a carrot, some gravy, water, a little wine, spices and you're done. The recipe actually calls for tomato paste, but we've always skipped that. We toss it all in the Crock Pot for the day and come dinner-time, we're chowing down. Best of all, one serving is a stupidly-low 200-250 calories (I usually end up with some extra chicken, so I call it 300 calories). Wait, 300 calories for a full, hearty, tasty, filling meal? Hell yeah!

We've decided to try mixing it up in the future, using beef, maybe meatballs, perhaps some kielbasa. We've even toyed with mixing chicken and beef, because we're freaking crazy and there's just no stopping us. But damn, that's a heck of a meal. We got it all ready to go last night, and this morning it's a quick pop into the Crock Pot and we're off and running. Can't wait to eat tonight!

Merry Christmas!

I'm having a blast this Christmas season. I'm not really sure what's different, or if anything's different. I always enjoy Christmas. But from Christmas carols to Lights on the Lake to my annual foray as Kris Kringle, himself, it's just been a great season so far. And there's still more to come, of course - it's only the 22nd, after all!

I'm very much looking forward to Christmas Eve. My wife has the day off from work, so she'll be home all day. We'll be furiously cooking and cleaning, I'm sure, as we've got company coming that evening. We always do Christmas Eve for the family at our house, and since my parents head to Florida for the winter and my brother lives on the West Coast, we end up entertaining my in-laws, who are a great bunch. And as much as I'm trying to watch my weight, all bets are off for Christmas Eve and Christmas day. For instance, on Christmas Eve, we're having:

A pastry-wrapped brie w/ crackers
Garlic toast
Meatballs in sauce (courtesy of my sister-in-law Diane)
Lasagna marinara
Chicken Alfredo broccoli lasagna (courtesy of my brother-in-law's "future ex-wife" (as he calls her) Heidi)
Green bean casserole
Cheesecake

And probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. I can't describe how much I'm looking forward to the Alfredo lasagna - from the first time I heard it mentioned, it just sounded delicious. And, somewhat oddly, I'm looking forward to the green bean casserole for no reason I can express other than it just sounds really festive and good.

For Christmas, I'm planning to have:
A ham
My home-made whipped potatoes
Frozen corn

Hmm, we're going to need some more stuff for Christmas. I wonder what? I'll have to talk to the wife about it.

Yeah, I don't think I'll bother to count calories on Friday or Saturday. I'm just going to enjoy the celebration and the spirit of the season.

I hope you do, as well! Have a very merry Christmas, and check back here for another article on Monday of next week.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The turkey is all brined, now it's time to whip up everything else. This year's menu will be:

Turkey brined with Alton Brown's recipe (just like last year). I'm thinking about brushing the skin with bacon grease to see what that does.

My homemade whipped potatoes

My homemade acorn squash, with lots of brown sugar and a little nutmeg

Corn (frozen), stuffing (boxed), dinner rolls (bought), cranberry sauce (canned), olives (off my olive tree. Just kidding, they're canned)

Plus whatever my wife makes for the boys - probably peanut butter or toast or something. And some sort of dessert that as far as I know my wife still hasn't decided on.

I can't WAIT! I love this holiday, because it's all about food (and giving thanks or something. I dunno. Mostly food!). My favorite part is after I've cooked and cleaned all day (I make most of the food) and then gorged myself, I stagger over to my chair and fall into a food coma for half an hour or so. Ahhh, the good life!

And then, to start thinking about Christmas dinner! I'm seriously toying with the idea of having a goose, if for no other reason than because I hate the filthy, disgusting things and would like to take out my vengeance upon one gastrically. Not sure if I'm up to strangling one myself, though - I may have to get it from a professional.

Here's hoping your thanksgiving is terrific, too!

Broken Bread

I suck at making bread. I can reliably make perfect French bread using my bread machine - you dump in flour, salt, water, butter and yeast and six hours later, you pull out a big rectangular loaf of bread that tastes pretty darn good. Zut alors! (get it? Cuz it's French bread!) But my success rate with other sorts of bread - even from the bread machine - is distressingly low.

I tried once to make dinner rolls using basically the same recipe from the same bread machine cookbook and they came out as dry little hockey pucks. The difference? Me! I had to take the dough out, cut it up into dinner rolls, and then bake them in the oven. Somehow, I broke them.

I also found a great-looking recipe to make Outback Steakhouse-style brown bread. I even went and got special flour to use in it (I forget what kind - wheat? Rye? I still have most of the bag around here somewhere). It was lousy - it didn't rise right and came out dry and crappy-tasting. Strike two - broken again!

Sunday, I tried to make true Italian bread for the first time. I again needed special flour, because it's just not real Italian bread if it doesn't have semolina flour in it. And let me tell you, finding Semolina flour is a pain in the nuggets. I finally tried an Italian imports store over in North Syracuse and they had it, so I was able to proceed. I went into an online forum I frequent and asked for advice on tried-and-true Italian bread recipes. I wanted ones I'd know worked from people who'd actually used them. I got one and decided to give it a try.

I followed the directions to the letter, even getting out a candy thermometer to make sure the warm water for the yeast was the optimum temperature (and it did seem to foam up nicely). It seemed to rise nicely the first time, but when I made it into a dough ball and set it out to rise the second time, it was... unimpressive. It got bigger, but it seemed more air than substance - a great big dough-glob that was puffed full of air but ready to collapse at any time. I dunno - it just didn't seem right. In the end, it baked up merely okay - it wasn't terrible and the flavor wasn't bad, but I still think it should have risen a whole lot more than it did. It was a really easy recipe, but somehow I broke it.

What's most surprising to me, in fact, is that my recent attempt to make Olive Garden-style breadsticks actually worked! It was a very similar recipe to the Italian bread (minus the semolina flour, but otherwise along much the same lines) and I made it one afternoon while I re-watched The Watchmen on DVD (which was pretty good, though I never read the comic so I have no basis for comparison there. Also, I wish the blue guy had worn pants.). And I'll be damned if it didn't come out spot-on perfect! It's the exception to the rule, however. As a baker, I'm 1 win, 2 losses and one that could generously be called a tie. I may need to stick to my bread machine.

Here's the breadsticks recipe, straight from Good Morning America:

Olive Garden Breadsticks

A Top Secret Restaurant Recipe

From the Kitchen of Todd Wilbur

Servings: Over 8

Difficulty: Easy

Cook Time: Over 120 min

Anyone who loves Olive Garden is probably also a big fan
of the bottomless basket of warm, garlicky breadsticks served
before each meal at the huge Italian casual chain. My guess is
that the breadsticks are proofed, and then sent to each restaurant,
where they are baked until golden brown, brushed with butter and
sprinkled with garlic salt. Getting the bread just right for a
good clone was tricky -- I tried several different amounts of yeast in
all-purpose flour, but then finally settled on bread flour to give these
breadsticks the same chewy bite as the originals. I discovered
that the two-stage rising process is also a crucial step to making the
perfect Top Secret Recipe for these very popular soft breadsticks.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons granulated sugar
3/4 teaspoon active dry yeast
1 cup plus 1 tablespoon warm
water (105 to 115 degrees F)
16 ounces bread flour (3 cups)
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter, softened

On top:
2 tablespoons butter, melted
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt

Directions

Dissolve the sugar and yeast in the warm water in a small
bowl or measuring cup and let the mixture sit for 5 minutes,
or until it becomes foamy on top.

Combine the flour and salt in a large bowl. Use the paddle
attachment on a stand mixer to mix the softened butter into
the flour. If you don't have a stand mixer, use a mixing spoon
to combine the butter with the flour. When the yeast mixture
is foamy, pour it into the flour mixture and use a dough hook
on your mixture to combine the ingredients and knead the
dough for approximately 10 minutes. If you don't have a stand
mixer, combine the ingredients and then knead the dough
by hand on a countertop for 10 minutes.


Place the dough in a covered container and let it sit for 1 to 1 1/2 hours, until it
doubles in size. When the dough has doubled, measure out 2-ounce
portions and roll the dough between your hands or on a countertop
to form sticks that are 7 inches long. Place the dough
on parchment paper-lined baking sheets, cover and set aside
for 1 to 1 1/2 hours, or until the dough doubles in size once
again.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Bake the breadsticks for 12 minutes, or until golden brown.
When the breadsticks come out of the oven, immediately
brush each one with melted butter and sprinkle with a little
garlic salt.

Makes 12-13 breadsticks

Party Time

Saturday night was pretty cool. I don't go to a whole lot of parties. Usually it's the same ones year after year - all of my family's various standard get-togethers for birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays. That's okay - I've never really been a big partier. I don't drink, don't smoke and don't use drugs - and never have - so that tended to kill most of the major party activities for me at 75% of the "real" parties I've attended in my life, from high school on up. I'm also surprisingly shy and quiet when I'm outside my comfort zone, which includes hanging around socializing with people I don't know too well. So that kills off any promise of fun at the remaining 25%.

But, as I said, Saturday night was pretty cool. One of my neighbors threw a cookout and invited my family, another neighbor family (whose daughter is the same age as mine), and a couple other people I never did get to know. One interesting aspect of this cookout is that half of the kids attending it had various severe food restrictions that added up to - artificial colors, flavors and preservatives; gluten; dairy; tree nuts; and peanuts. Which doesn't really leave a whole lot. Our host was a trooper, though. She put together a terrific meal of chicken and pork speidies, lasagne, salad, bread, fruits, and s'mores for dessert (with allergy-safe graham crackers and such). Not everything met everyone's dietary restrictions, but there was something for everybody. My only dietary restriction is trying not to eat everything in sight, and I admit I was challenged. It was all really good.

Instead of bringing a dish to pass, as would be typical at this sort of event, the two guest families were each asked to bring something special. The other family brought a wagonload of beers and wines, which was entirely wasted on my family but which everyone else seemed to really like. My family's gift to the party was song.

I admit, I was nervous and excited going in. I've only ever performed on the guitar in a semi-public setting before, the time I played "Everything I do (I do it for you)" at my 15th wedding anniversary party. That was just family, and I still managed to blow the guitar solo completely to hell. In this case, I'd certainly met everyone before (except the two women I didn't know at all), but I wouldn't say I knew any of them terribly well. So performing all evening for them was an entirely different experience for me.

My son and I started rehearsing almost a month ago. Nothing fancy, we just made sure to rotate through our repertoire of songs more thoroughly during our daily practice, instead of focusing on any specific tune or genre. Then, beginning a week before the party, I started to gather materials. First I attempted to play a selection of tunes without the music in front of me and determined that that was absolutely not an option. There are only a couple of songs that I can play without something to look at and not totally screw them up partway through.

I started to gather together the songs for which I had lyrics with chords, then I created new pages for the songs that I didn't have electronically. This included taking anything that was multiple pages long and condensing it down to a single page, because I just wasn't going to try to mess with that outside at night in the dark. Oh crap - in the dark! Partway through the week it occurred to me that it would be getting dark shortly after the party started at 6 PM. Since I had to visit the music store to pick up a new trumpet book for my kid anyway, I also bought myself a nice battery-powered light for the music stand.

Yes, that's right, I was bringing music, a music stand and a set of lights to a cookout. Hey, it was that or not play at all - I don't have an in-between. At least I was going acoustic - can you imagine if I needed to set up an amp, too?

I started to get a bit more nervous the week leading up to the party. I wanted to play - my son and I have worked pretty hard to learn the guitar over the last eighteen months or so and it would be fun to finally put all that practice to use, but still... In a lot of ways, I know exactly how far short I fall of being a real, capable, versatile musician. I mean, the fact that I need the music to play is just one example. I can't play anything by ear. I make a fair number of mistakes at the best of times, and if I'm not really concentrating I make exponentially more. I still suck at barre chords, even ones I try to use all the time like F, F#m, and Bm, so when I play songs that require those (such as Wylde Mountain Thyme and Country Roads) there are spots that sound especially crummy. Worst of all, those are just the issues I know about. Those are the ones that I can spot with my limited understanding of the guitar. I'm sure a real expert could spot dozens more. All of which really begged the question, "Am I actually up for this? Am I remotely good enough, or am I going to end up like on of those losers on American Idol?" You know the ones - they get up to perform insisting they're the next Michael Jackson, then they open their mouths and the whole world discovers they can't carry a tune with a forklift. And the worst part, of course, is that they're so utterly delusional that they not only don't recognize their lack of ability, they somehow transpose it into the belief that they're better than everyone else. I certainly don't fall into that category because I'm sure I'm not better than... well, than much of anyone else. But let's face it - if I believed I were truly unlistenable, I wouldn't have agreed to play. The question is, how much worse might I be than I think I am? Only time would tell.

By the time Saturday rolled around, I'd put together five packets to bring - one for me and my son to use, the rest for the others to share in case they wanted to sing along. There were eighteen songs in there - a mix of renaissance faire favorites, classic American folk songs, and some late-20th-century pop. In theory, my son and I could play them all with varying degrees of competence, and we'd run through most of them a few extra times to be sure. By early afternoon, the guitars were tuned and packed in our gig bags, the music stand was collapsed and packed, and the lawn chairs were waiting. Luckily, I took a look at the lawn chairs (of which there weren't enough for our family to begin with - we ought to buy more sometime) and thought to myself, "Ah crap, we can't play the guitar in those - the arms will be in the way." I needed something like a stool or a kitchen chair, the kind without arms. Actually, I needed two of them. I needed them to be portable and something I didn't mind taking out into a relatively damp back yard. Hmmm.... I've got it! Milk crates!

My house is chock full of milk crates. They make great, relatively cheap organizers, and we must own two dozen of them. Sadly, nearly all of them are just that... organizers. They're not very sturdy, just cheap plastic. I needed the real thing - the kind they'd actually have used to carry big, heavy glass jugs of milk around. Luckily, an intensive search showed that we did in fact own one of those - a nice heavy-duty one perfectly suited to my fat ass. My son, who weighs about as much as a really heavy pile of laundry, would be fine with one of the cheap-o crates. NOW, at last, we were ready.

We kicked it off with my son's current favorite - The Campfire Song Song from some episode of Spongebob Squarepants. We then worked our way through the packet of songs, taking requests throughout the evening. The party went on for nearly four hours and, somehow, with only about 90 minutes worth of music, I somehow played for about three of them. I filled in the gaps with a basic 12-bar blues, some nonsense I don't have a name for, a scale that I used to think was a Pentatonic but is actually something else (but which sounds kind of cool) and a rendition of Everything I do that actually went pretty well. I even nailed the solo!

Now, of course nobody was likely to complain about the music. Even if I sucked, chances are good that nobody would have complained much - it would have been rude. But they didn't have to applaud, and applaud they did - sometimes vigorously (and sometimes less so - some tunes were better than others, I confess). THAT was pretty awesome. I'm not going to be charging admission anytime soon (or ever, most likely), but the idea that I could actually provide even amateur-quality entertainment at this event was just awesome. It reinvigorated me. As annoyed as I may get with my ability, as frustrated as I often am with my progress at learning to play the guitar, that one evening of music made all the difference. I'm easily years away from being satisfied with my guitar-playing. Hell, I may never be satisfied with it. But I'm more motivated than ever to keep working at it. Someday, maybe - just perhaps - I'll be good. That's worth working for.

Tacos For People Who Don't Like Tacos

My family and I don't eat Mexican food. None of us like the taste of chili powder (or anything else chili-flavored), and I detest the taste of peppers (sweet, bell, jalapeño, makes no difference). Also, none of us are huge fans of beans (I can stand them, nobody else will touch them). I'm no devotee of Mexican food, of course - I only know what I see on TV and on commercials for Taco Bell and Old El Paso. But as far as common Mexican foods go, it seems that beans, chili powder, and peppers tend to be key ingredients.
Still, my wife and I hypothesized that we might be able to make tacos even with these limitations. Getting creative in the kitchen can be a big part of the fun of cooking, and this seemed like it was worth a try. Why should we be left out of this whole type of cuisine just because we, you know, don't like most of the major ingredients? Now, mind you, I'm not necessarily suggesting that anyone else should try or would be happy with this recipe. It's just an example of what you can do when you free your mind and are willing to experiment with food.

Mike's Italian "Tacos"
Serves 4

1 Package hard taco shells
1 lb ground beef
1-1.5 cup tomato sauce (marinara, or whatever store-bought stuff you've got lying around)
2-3 tbsp diced onions
~1 cup shredded cheese (chedder or a blend of cheeses)

Seasonings (all to taste)
Salt
Black Pepper
Garlic Powder
Onion Powder

Warm the sauce in a small pan or microwave and bake the taco shells according to the package directions. In a medium fry-pan, combine the onions and ground beef and season to taste with the seasonings suggested. Feel free to improvise. Sauté over medium heat until the beef is brown and the onions are soft. Drain the grease. Add the tomato sauce and mix together thoroughly. Spoon the mixture into the taco shells and top with the shredded cheese. Molto Bene! Tacos al Miguel!